I met Kehinde Wiley at his exhibition "Archaeology of Silence", which opened at the Fondazione Cini in Venice alongside the 59th Biennale. We talked about new paradigms of power, about oppression and even about his dream to exhibit in Israel.
A new era
We live in a time when social movements legitimize art of a kind never previously seen in museums. I’m referring to work created by black artists, who until recently were far from the spotlight. One of the most prominent of them is the American artist Kehinde Wiley, who rose to common awareness by Barack Obama, who chose him to paint the official presidential portrait at the end of his term. This outstanding portrait hangs with honor in the Hall of Presidents at the National Portrait Museum in Washington next to the classic portraits of the white presidents who preceded Obama.
Kehinde Wiley, born in Los Angeles in 1977, strives to create a paradigm shift through portraits, aiming to disrupt the perception of representations of power, as it has been expressed in art throughout history.
“What I try to do is to work within the language of power within the history that has created the roles. It has created the language that we all know and recognize and I want to sort of take that code and rework it”.
Venice
Inside the dark exhibition space at Fondazione Cini, monumental paintings of black men in various reclining positions emerge – some dead, some resting. Only they are illuminated and seem to shine in the darkness. Wiley’s move is sophisticated. He presents his black protagonists on a larger-than-life scale, and while dwarfing the audience, he forces them to confront their own prejudice regarding encounters with young, black men. But instead of a threat his models express vulnerability and beauty set in floral and colorful backgrounds. Leaning on the tradition of white portraiture, Wiley replaces the white aristocrats with young black men he randomly meets on the streets. He offers to paint them and suggests they choose a pose based on images of classic portraits. He then proceeds to paint them in their street clothes and “bling” jewelry.
Some say kitsch, some may call him decorative but I say wow! These powerful paintings, which use beauty as a seductive means to convey harsh messages about violence against blacks, have an important social role.
The blue boy
It all started when Wiley was exposed to classical portrait painting as a child, as part of an art class he attended from the age of 11. His mother sent him and his twin brother (the meaning of the name Kehinde is the second twin) to study art to keep them off the streets. The Huntington Museum in Los Angeles was one of the places they visited as part of the class. Young Kehinde was very impressed by the portrait paintings – the fancy clothes of the characters, the jewelry and the pets – the visual status symbols of the white aristocracy.
The star of the Huntington collection is Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy”, and recently, in honor of the centenary of the purchase of the painting by Henry Huntington, Wiley was invited to paint his own version of the famous painting.
“It really was a kind of miraculous closing of a circle for me, not only in terms of the blue boy and its importance as my starting point and my inspiration but especially this sense of nascent, powerfulness of the young aristocrat. This language of empire and dominance inspired my search to find spaces for myself.”
Down
The exhibition in Venice (which recently closed) is a continuation of an exhibition presented in 2008 at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York, titled “Down”.
“Down was a show that I did of fallen angels, fallen soldiers, this kind of bittersweet metaphor for so much of what’s going on within the way that we look at police violence in America and certainly all over the world. But also this is kind of like hopeful, redemptive thing that you start to see in a lot of the work as well. So this is my ode to the resilience that you see all over west Africa and all of these developing countries that are finally starting to come into their own, but it’s also a very strong and firm look at the realities that exist with regards to state violence, with regards to brutalities that are visited upon the lives of so many black and brown kids all over the world.”
The exhibition in Venice also included bronze sculptures of the painted images and a five meters high statue of a black man, who appears to have been shot, sprawled on the back of a giant horse. “This is a continuation of my obsession with paintings of soldiers on horses, a ridiculous display of phallic power,” says Wiley. The reference here is clear, following the overthrow of statues that commemorated figures of racist white men who were in key positions. As usual, Wiley suggests recoding the traditions that are no longer relevant.
Kehinde Wiley in Israel
At the end of our conversation, I asked Wiley about the series of works he did during his visit to Israel in 2010. During these years, he worked on a series called “The World Stage”, which led him to paint young black people in different parts of the world.
“Israel was a place that I was always afraid to go to because it was just so politically fraught there’s this expectation. Well, certainly as a black man in America, we want to be able to look at injustices socially from every point of view, no matter what. And so, looking at the Palestinian situation, looking at the Ethiopian immigrants who were there, there’s a very, very complex set of realities that are on the ground.
“How is it ever possible to go into the state of Israel to create a body of work that does more than just point, that does more than just participate in a well-trodden political conversation? Is it possible to go in there and to find nuance?
And so my solution was simply to work with individuals to start with Kalkidan Mashasha, a young musician who introduced me to a number of friends in his housing block, who introduced me to friends of theirs. So it really took on this much less geopolitical conversation and much more personal one. But by virtue of that personal narrative, we were able to sort of feather out in a very natural way, rather than it feeling like a sort of didactic exercise. And I think that’s what shows in that body of work. 14 paintings from that series were exhibited in 2012 at the Jewish museum in New York. I would love to show them in Israel”.
I hope someone will take it from here,
